SLOWLY, she slid out of her silk dressing gown. She approached the dressing table, slipped into the rattan chair. Naked, she looked herself over in the glass. Her hair was short, androgynous. Her nose was slightly turned up at the end, like a doll’s. Her lips were open, the bottom lip fleshy, as if about to be kissed. It seemed to tremble.
Her eyes were the part of herself she knew best. Their colour was indefinite, grey-green, changeable. Sometimes they took on a misty pastel tone. Today she wanted them to burn, beckon. Taking up a stick of kohl, she outlined them thickly with black. With a wide, loaded brush, she heaped dark shadow over the lids.
So Sylvia Kristel became Emmanuelle: the young woman who in 1974, wearing only long pearls and a feather boa, invited cinema audiences the world over to watch her explore les dernières limites de l’erotisme. She found them on a squash court, in a jet plane, under a waterfall. She made love with men and women too, on beaches and under palms, all over Thailand.
Such a film had never been on general release before. It was a sensation. Of course, some countries banned it: Brazil, Spain, Japan, the Arab world. Others, like Britain, cut it heavily. This surprised its star. To her it was “charming”, and “innocent”. It was mostly fun to make, and gave her a chance to see Thailand. The love scenes were tastefully veiled under breaking foam, silk sheets, mosquito nets. She kept her mother from seeing it for years: and when at last she did, she said, “Is that all?”
She thought of innocence, too, as she prepared for the role. Innocence somehow married to vampishness, sending out messages that were at once contradictory and unsettling. Promiscuity married to aloofness, as the unattainable object of desire. She seemed in this film to give herself to everyone. But her heart she didn’t give. Her long, willowy body was rented out, to become the fantasy possession of thousands of devoted men. But her price was too high, and they would never have her.
When reporters asked whether she was like Emmanuelle, she laughed. How could she be like her? She had been to a convent school, had an IQ of 167, and spoke five languages. She came from dull Utrecht, where she worked to support her divorced, tippling mother. She was moderate, moral, responsible, “Calvinist”. Obedient, Calvinist Sylvia, instructed to simulate oral sex, took trouble to learn her lines and repeated the scene until it was perfect. That way, she could forget the “immodesty” of what she was doing. She was told that no one cared what she said; she would be dubbed anyway. Later, making films of a slightly tamer sort for Claude Chabrol and Roger Vadim and in Hollywood, she was told no one cared what she wore, as long as she removed it. She accepted these boundaries, including the fact that her agile, fragile beauty had typecast her for life.
But Emmanuelle seethed with contradictions, and so did she. Responsible, restrained Sylvia was also a rebel who embraced freedom and fed freely on excess. Nudity never troubled her: at the age of ten she had danced naked by moonlight on the roof of the hotel her parents ran. She smoked at 11, and sneaked cognac from the bar. At the “Emmanuelle” audition she lost her lingerie-dress with easy confidence, continuing to smoke as she let the delicate straps fall gently from her shoulders.
Attention, she had discovered, was something she needed: the stares of men, even lewd stares, like those of Uncle Hans, the hotel manager, as he had watched her ride her bike round the dim red-lit bar before licking her face all over with his hard, slobbering tongue. She needed the reaching hands, the paparazzi and the crowds. Her own face in the mirror enraptured her; at one point, her grandmother disapprovingly stuck newspaper over the glass. On the road to fame in 1973, about to win, at 21, the Miss TV Europe crown, she emerged from her bath, wrapped like a gift in her white robe, to plant a huge kiss on the steamed-up bathroom mirror. Here was the deal: her beauty freely given in exchange for immense, doting love.
The affection she actually received was fragmentary. There were several long-term lovers, with one of whom, Hugo Claus, a Belgian writer, she had a son, and two short-term husbands. The second lost her savings on a film project, leaving her with $400 in the world. Blazing stardom lasted a decade, in which she became addicted to Dom Perignon and cocaine. Having struggled to abandon them, she retreated gradually to Amsterdam: still elegant, still pale, standing tall as the nuns had taught her.
Naked in the sea
“Emmanuelle” followed her, the theme tune lilting in her head. It had spawned a score of soft-core sequels and imitators, most forgettable. In 1993, to get a little money, she made “Emmanuelle 7”, playing a Madame instructing her young charges in seduction. By now, though, she preferred to paint. She liked the solitariness of it, the way no one told her what to do. Her canvases became a new sort of mirror in which she appeared in vivid primary colours: swimming naked in a blue-green sea, wearing her long “Emmanuelle” pearls, or about to be kissed by the shadow of a man. Her wide eyes were rimmed in black, her surprised lips bright red. And, once again, she did not need to have anything to say.
